I usually don’t need development logs persisted after I’m done with a development session of a Rails app. Sometimes the development.log file can balloon up to gigabytes if I forget to delete it. I found a way to delete this file after a Ruby on Rails application exits in development mode.

Deleting development.log on Every Exit

In config/environments/development.rb, add the following:

# delete local dev logs after exiting
at_exit do
  development_logfile = Rails.application.config.paths['log'].first

  # if development.log exists, delete it.
  if File.exist?(development_logfile)
    Rails.logger.debug 'Deleting development.log...'
    File.delete(development_logfile)
  end
end

This code will delete development.log after the Rails process exits.

For example, I can start up a Rails app locally and see that a development.log file is created under log/:

$ rails s
=> Booting Puma
=> Rails 7.0.4.3 application starting in development
=> Run `bin/rails server --help` for more startup options
Puma starting in single mode...
* Puma version: 6.0.0 (ruby 3.1.2-p20) ("Sunflower")
*  Min threads: 5
*  Max threads: 5
*  Environment: development
*          PID: 18528
* Listening on http://127.0.0.1:3000
* Listening on http://[::1]:3000
Use Ctrl-C to stop

And I can see the development.log file under log/:

$ ls -1 log/
bullet.log
development.log # here's the development log file
production.log
test.log

Now when I exit the rails process, I should see a message saying “Deleting development.log…” and I should also see the development.log file disappear:

^C- Gracefully stopping, waiting for requests to finish
=== puma shutdown: 2023-05-21 13:58:25 -0700 ===
- Goodbye!
Exiting
Deleting development.log...

The custom message is there. Now to verify that there is no development.log file:

$ ls -1 log/
bullet.log
production.log
test.log

The development.log file is now gone!

Deleting development.log if it Reaches a Certain File Size

Maybe you want to keep the development.log file around unless it reaches a certain file size. If that’s the case, we can tweak what we previously added in config/environments/development.rb:

# delete local dev logs after exiting
at_exit do
  development_logfile = Rails.application.config.paths['log'].first

  if File.exist?(development_logfile)
    # get file size of development.log and convert to Megabytes rounded to 2 decimal places
    file_size = (File.size(development_logfile) / 1_000_000.0).round(2)

    # if development.log is 50MB or more, delete it.
    if file_size >= 50
      Rails.logger.debug 'development.log is over 50MB. Deleting...'
      File.delete(development_logfile)
    end
  end
end